Within a decade this might just be normalized, and nobody will make much of it.
Right now, I'm seeing Beyond and Impossible substitutes at burger restaurants, and it always comes with a couple of dollars surcharge, because it is more expensive. Imagine the day when the meat patty comes with a surcharge, because the substitute is cheaper!
I am always soapboxing about this, but the only way we can meaningfully address environmental or ethical concerns, is by doing it through the economy. The "best" choice has to also be the cheapest choice, because then people will as if by magic choose that most of the time, unlike when you only have people's conscience to motivate them, then the wallet still rules most of the time.
Well, that or by abolishing capitalism. Which we'll have to do anyway, given that "there's no competitive advantage in not wrecking the planet."
But yeah if we can get everyone to switch to Impossible burgers that could definitely buy us some time. :)
You should try reading The Conquest of Bread.
Your comment is obviously propaganda, so I doubt this will help, but I strongly recommend reading some anarchist literature before making claims like that. The Conquest of Bread is a good starting point, but a bit outdated at this point.
None of this has anything to do with socialism or social programs or anything like that.
I've read plenty of anarchist literature, and studied economics extensively. I would, ironically, label myself something of an anarchist as well.
You've called my individual thoughts, constructed by myself alone, after careful and considerable study, propaganda. You're confusing my tautological deduction for ideology. That's fine, but golly does it make me sad. You're seeing what you want to see, my friend.
Edit: Also, none of this even makes a value judgement about the worthiness of abolishing capitalism or infringing on personal freedoms. Perhaps it's a worthwhile calculation? That's not an opinion I'm bringing up - but the word "capitalism" has a simple meaning: trade and property. Abolishing the ability of humans to own things or do certain categories of things _is exactly the definition of limiting freedom_. Socialist philosophers are not unaware of this and their entire philosophy is built upon the calculation of limited personal freedoms to enable potentially greater net happiness. This is not a controversial opinion, is my point.
The fact that capital ownership in a cooperation does not expose an individual to legal liability for every action of that corporation is what let’s you have capital markets. A banker may loan a car dealership money with minimal concern beyond the risk of that money.
Without that protection the engine of capitalism breaks down even with private property rights. But, even simply applying strict liability to management would cause significant breakdowns. Picture the CEO of Five Guys going to prison if even a single person got food poisoning via negligence. Are they going to try to expand past a single burger joint?
PS: In practice this seems to work well. But, the ability to have legally enforceable contracts etc goes beyond simple trade. After all people would buy and sell used goods in socialist countries, but such trade did not make them capitalist countries.
(Feel free to replace capitalism with free enterprise if you don't like the term "capital".)
If it means something else to you, I'm sorry about that.
97% of soy meal (itself 80% of the soybean mass) produced in the US is used to feed animals for meat, not for making soy-based meat substitutes:
Say it takes 50 cents' worth of soy and 50 cents' worth of other expenses to produce $1 worth of beef, and it takes 90 cents' worth of soy and 10 cents' worth of other expenses to produce $1 worth of meat substitute. If the effective price of soy falls by 10% due to subsidies (and other costs remain the same), the cost of beef will fall by 5%, while the cost of meat substitute will fall by 9%.
Once R&D costs of the meat substitute are accounted for, the marginal cost of production is lower. So at the same or slightly lower retail price than meat, an equivalent substitute's profit margin will be huge compared to meat. That's what these firms are after.
And in the long run, industrial scale meat production will take a big hit.
I think we agree on this.
> If the production of meat substitutes from soy could be made more efficient than the production of meat from soy
It already is far cheaper from an energy-input (hence cost) and carbon-footprint perspective. https://impossiblefoods.app.box.com/s/edwcfyvojzsvzn5d633dxt...
That's why big chains like Burger King are moving to offer something in the space, not out of some ethical obligation about climate change or animal welfare.
The difference is that Impossible and its competitors are making a product competitive with real meat, with nearly the same flavor and texture properties. That's the game changer as it opens a huge market that eschew traditional veggie burgers.
So from an efficiency perspective we wouldn't want to entirely eliminate meat production, just drastically curtail it. But from an animal suffering perspective and a "methane is bad" perspective maybe we do want to eliminate it.
In WWII Britain came closest to having to surrender due to food shortages. It didn't have then (and doesn't have now) enough food production to feed everybody, it relies on imports, and during a war that gets tricky. It got down to, I think, one week's rations on hand. If the U-boats had been just a little bit luckier for just another couple of weeks the British government anticipated uncontrollably levels of public disorder and then one way or another surrender.
Culture varies, and it seems unlikely that the British "stiff upper lip" would have carried on through starvation rations as the Japanese did. Certainly the government of the day is recorded as having expected to be overthrown once the reality of starvation was felt by the common people, unless the next shipments of food arrived (which they did).
The number one reason for deforestation in the Amazon is to provide space and resources to farm cattle for beef. My point is, switching to a non animal based burger has larger implications that the overall health of the people eating the burger.
This is a wonderful goal, but I highly doubt this will happen in my lifetime.
There are actors in the cultural discourse that are already trying to make large scale meat consumption a cultural authenticity issue, especially if you read some of the nativist criticism of the Green New Deal [1]
I don't think that line of manipulation will go away, as it always will have some cultural currency with a subset of the population, but eventually the economics of the meat substitutes will win out, and "real meat" will become more of a special occasion thing, like truffles.
1. https://www.eater.com/2019/3/1/18246220/aoc-green-deal-burge...
Most people that are vegan or vegetarian choose that, because the ethics part of eating meat is the most important factor for them, with price and taste and nutrition trailing that.
And then a lot of those people make the assumption that everyone who isn't vegan absolutely doesn't care about the ethics of it. But that is simply not true. A lot of people, myself included, care about the ethics, it's just that we care more about taste and cost and nutrition. I love eating a good burger, or a good steak. I'm sorry a cow had to die, but I'm not sorry enough to stop doing it.
But give me an alternative that is just as good, but where cows don't have to die, and I'll switch in a heartbeat.
Imagine the following scenario: I have a choice between two burgers. They both taste the same and cost the same, but the first one requires a cow to die, and the second one doesn't.
If I don't care about ethics, then I would choose randomly between the two, because that's not a deciding factor.
But if I consistently choose the second one, then I obviously care about ethics, it is a deciding factor for me. It's just not the most important deciding factor, but it's still there. Why does it have to be binary? Why does it have to be all-or-nothing for you?
I obviously might not care as much as you do about it, but you claiming that I don't care about it at all is incredibly offensive.
If we're talking about the global population I'd say it's more than a small subset and it's not a cultural "statement", it's just culture.
People in Mexico aren't going to eat fake lengua or carnitas. Doro wat with fake chicken? Anything grilled or bbq'd. Sashimi, sushi...
People have been eating some of this stuff for hundreds if not thousands of years. I think it's a very Americentric view to suggest that people are going to stop eating their traditional foods in favor of fake meat.
This might be the case to some degree in Western first world countries but even there, I don't see people in the mid-west giving up real steak anytime soon.
It's not an all-or-nothing market. There will always be a demand for those things. But in the end what is used for what will be dictated by the economics, as cuisine always has been, even in traditional culture. Eating things like lengua, or tripe and other off-cuts of meat were largely about not wasting meat when resources were scarce, not about identity politics.
Take chorizo ... turns out Mexico already has a vegetarian version of this most culturally sacred of foods: https://www.mexgrocer.com/74562-06205.html
I was offered it with eggs ("huevos con soyrizo") at a breakfast restaurant in Baja ... 17 years ago.
There are plenty of dishes that use ground meat or meat that has been spiced or stewed to the point that the taste difference with regular meat is marginal.
> This might be the case to some degree in Western first world countries but even there, I don't see people in the mid-west giving up real steak anytime soon.
They don't have to. Real meat from slaughtered animals isn't going away, but it's use cases will be more limited to steaks, etc, which aren't "everyday" foods anyways.
And a good amount of Mexico's population is urban and first world, just like their counterparts in other countries. From what I can tell, urban Mexico has as liberal a palate as any other urban part of the world, be that NYC or London.
But also, if it's cheaper? People will eat it for sure regardless of the culture.
Side note: a lot of those things that are "hundreds if not thousands of years" are actually a lot more recent if you look at them. It's pretty common for cultures to reuse the name of some old dish for a new one that becomes more common, and is similar in some way - not even necessarily in terms of how it tastes, but e.g. in its purpose. In other cases, you can trace a direct connection to some much older recipe, but new additions have mutated it beyond all recognition. Just look at what the introduction of potato did to traditional recipes in Europe.
Soy and legumes are pretty common allergens for people, and the effects mild enough early in life that some may not realize it's actually legumes (mostly soy) that is the problem. I got used to the side effects and was only at 42 when it started to get bad enough that I found out via elimination diet.
There has never been any reliable study or controlled experiment indicating that dietary cholesterol or saturated fat are the causes of anything negative. Sugar and refined grains have a MUCH higher correlation (higher than even early smoking studies). High fructose intake in particular has been a leading issue.
Is saturated fat bad for you? A diet rich in saturated fats can drive up total cholesterol, and tip the balance toward more harmful LDL cholesterol, which prompts blockages to form in arteries in the heart and elsewhere in the body. For that reason, most nutrition experts recommend limiting saturated fat to under 10% of calories a day.
A handful of recent reports have muddied the link between saturated fat and heart disease. One meta-analysis of 21 studies said that there was not enough evidence to conclude that saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease, but that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat may indeed reduce risk of heart disease.
Two other major studies narrowed the prescription slightly, concluding that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats like vegetable oils or high-fiber carbohydrates is the best bet for reducing the risk of heart disease, but replacing saturated fat with highly processed carbohydrates could do the opposite.
Why would refined oils from sources that wouldn't have been available to man for 99.9% of human and pre-human existence be recommended at all? This article does nothing but repeat most of the same tropes as espoused for the past half century with no real supporting data behind it.
Edit:
from: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/80/3/550/4690530
> A causal relation between total and LDL cholesterol in blood and CAD has long been accepted. However, despite the strength of the relation between circulating concentrations of LDL cholesterol and heart disease, one should not assume that the relation between saturated fatty acid intake and heart disease is equally strong.
...
> Considerable evidence indicates that dietary saturated fats support the enhancement of HDL metabolism. In a study of the effects of reduced dietary intakes of total and saturated fat on HDL subpopulations in a group of multiracial, young and elderly men and women, subjects consumed each of the following 3 diets for 8 wk: an average American diet (34.3% of energy from total fat and 15.0% of energy from saturated fat), the American Heart Association Step I diet (28.6% of energy from total fat and 9.0% of energy from saturated fat), and a diet low in saturated fat (25.3% of energy from total fat and 6.1% of energy from saturated fat) (25). HDL2-cholesterol concentrations decreased in a stepwise fashion after the reduction of total and saturated fat. A reduction in dietary total and saturated fat decreased both large (HDL2 and HDL2b) and small, dense HDL subpopulations, although the decreases in HDL2 and HDL2b were most pronounced. Serum triacylglycerol concentrations were negatively correlated with changes in HDL2 and HDL2b cholesterol.
from: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/109/2/433/528...
> Those on a low-carbohydrate weight-loss diet who increase their percentage intake of dietary saturated fat may improve their overall lipid profile provided they focus on a high-quality diet and lower their intakes of both calories and refined carbohydrates. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01826591.
They weren't replaced with vegetables, they were replaced with sugar made from cheap overproduced corn, and hydrogenated oils. Neither of those is a vegetable.
We wouldn't have nearly the diabetes problems we have now if they were replaced by more fresh vegetables.
For the most part vegetable intake is fine. Though excess fruit consumption year round, and in particular juice is pretty much inline with straight sugar. Your pancreas and liver don't care that it's "natural sugar" a term which irks me to no end.
The link between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol is much weaker than previously hypothesized, that's true, but there's ample evidence of the superiority of a vegetable rich diet.
The medical and scientific consensus is still that diets high in saturated fats - especially animal fats - as well as trans fats increase your risk of heart disease and high cholesterol. Other lifestyle risk factors are obesity, lack of exercise, smoking and diabetes.
Not many people can afford the grocery bill of an all dairy/beef diet. Everybody I've ever met who does keto consumes more vegetable fiber than the average american many times over, because without grain as a filler and a wallet deep enough to gorge yourself on beef and cheese all day long, fibrous vegetables are the obvious solution.
As to margerine, it is emphatically NOT better for you than real butter or lard/tallow. Seed oils are probably third in line behind sugar and grains as the biggest causes of human dysfunction.
Ground beef is particularly bad for gout, so I would order this in a second given a choice.